Gerald talks about his family's flight from Nazi Germany to China in 1939, on board of the German steamship "Scharnhorst."  He mentions the instrumental role of Jewish relief organizations that assisted his family during the trip and describes his first impressions of Shanghai.

Fred recalls his first impressions of Shanghai while, housed in a refugee camp, he and his family were adapting to life in China after having fled Nazi Germany in 1939.  He notes that soon after their arrival,  his family moved out of the camp to the Shanghai Japanese quarter.

In 1941 more anti- Jewish measures were implemented and intensified in Nazi Germany including ration cards, forbidding Jews to emigrate and deportations of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps. Gerda Haas was a nurse at a hospital in Berlin  when her mother was deported to the Riga ghetto in Latvia in late 1941.

After signing the Munich Agreement in September 1938 and under the pretext of protecting the interests of ethnic Germans who agitated for Nazi rule, Hitler annexed the Czechoslovakian borderlands. While some still hoped that giving up Czechoslovak territory would bring peace, the agreement signed by Great Britain, Germany, Italy, and France meant the beginning of occupation for the citizens of Czechoslovakia.

Harold Alexander fled Nazi controlled Germany to the United States and then joined the United States Army. He returned to Germany towards the end of WWII as an American soldier and met a Jewish woman who was still in hiding. He remembers helping the woman and her family by bringing them a truck full of food and connecting them to family in the United States.

Ann Monka was born in Lida a small town with a prosperous Jewish population in Poland. Ann and her mother were separated from her brother, sister and father after escaping the Lida Ghetto. Ann remembers when she and her mother hid in the Polish forests with the Bielski Partisans, while the rest of her family escaped deportations by jumping from the Nazi transport trains.

Ursula Bruce was only a child when her family fled Nazi Germany to South Africa in the 1930’s. When Ursula married and had her own family she became very involved in human rights and joined the Institute of Race Relations. Even Ursula’s son refused to join the South African military to protest the government’s racist policies. She reflects on her family’s relationship with Nelson Mandela, former South African president and anti-apartheid leader who died on December 5 2013. He was 95 years old.

In 1941, the Nazi regime, ordered the Jews in Germany to wear a Yellow Star of David inscribed with the word Jude (Jew). The following year, in June 1942, Jews in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and other lands under German control were ordered to begin wearing Yellow Stars.  Betty Gerard shows the Yellow Star with the word Jood (Jew in Dutch) she was forced to wear as a child in the Westerbork Concentration Camp in the Netherlands.

United States army veteran Don Shimazu remembers the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor December 7 1941. He was a part of the ROTC (Reserve Officers' Training Corps) at the University of Hawaii and remembers being put on duty right away.  A Hawaiian native, he also reflects on the tension the attack created in his family, since his parents were Japanese citizens.